Thomas Kayzel

This essay forms part of a symposium on Elisabeth Popp Berman’s Thinking Like an Economist. While I applaud the nuanced and complex history Berman has written, I want to raise several questions about how her key concept of an “economic style of reasoning” relates to other causal factors that help explain the rightward shift in American politics. In particular, I make three arguments. First, Berman describes the economic style as a “technocratic ideology,” but I contend that a style of reasoning cannot, by definition, itself constitute an ideology. Second, by focusing primarily on the economic style while largely setting aside neoliberalism as an ideology, Berman risks overlooking important pieces of the puzzle she seeks to solve. Finally, I argue that the economic style functioned less as a vehicle for either technocratic or neoliberal ideology than as a mode of depoliticization. By weakening the explicitly political commitments of economic expertise, it undermined the resistance that politically motivated economists might otherwise have mounted against the profession’s broader rightward shift.

This article advances the methodological program of an environmental history of ideas, addressing the limitations of dominant approaches in intellectual history, notably Skinner’s contextualism and Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte. We argue that these frameworks systematically marginalize the environment by treating it as external to political vocabularies. Instead, we conceptualize political thought as co- constituted with material affordances, territorial practices, and ecological constraints. Through probes into canonical concepts—the state, property, and frontier—we illustrate how environmental transformations structured political orders and discourses. This perspective reframes intellectual history, highlighting the reciprocal interplay between ecological conditions and conceptual innovation across modernity.